Barbarella – An Echo That's Reversing

Sitting in on an auction

[ed.: This was back in Oct, just now cleaning up and posting even though I never really finished my thoughts.]

A month or so back I found a painting of Barbarella that Jean-Claude Forest created at Cinecittà Studios during filming of the Jane Fonda movie. It is one of only two that he painted there and one of them was up for auction at Heritage Auctions. According to the site, the painting/s were missing for almost 60 years. I could only imagine what it will sell for. Well, I guess I don’t have to imagine because I’m sitting in on the auction right now (12 Oct) just to find out (and because art auctions are kinda fun). Let’s go…

2024 October 12 – 13 International Comic Art Signature® Auction #7381

Jean-Claude Forest Barbarella Painting Original Art (Cinecittà Studios, 1967) at Heritage Auctions

Spectacle

But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness.

Over the past six or so months I’ve on and off been reading Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle. I had encountered his ideas in an essay which used them to explain much of modern social media, key is applying his observation of how capitalism molds “people” into “consumers” in such a way as to make their primary identities not only what they purchase, but the act of purchasing. See: YouTube videos of product influencers and the post-apocalyptically odd phenomenon of pre-teens making thousands of dollars a week off of unboxing videos. “Apple is better than Windows” has supplanted the identity of ideas with the identity of product.

(as always: my understanding of him may be a bit naive)

The Year of Italy

I started at some point to give years names. This may have/probably has been inspired by the completely unfortunate aspect in the novel Infinite Jest where the US sells years to corporations in order to make money. After corporate purchase years would become: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, etc. It’s a bleak mirror within a literary conceit of pretty much what we’ve become.

So, less bleakly, I started to give my years themes. This, 2025, is The Year of Italy.

Barbarella the Smuggler–That tonality thing

Work on the piece has been slow but satisfying. Well, unsatisfyingly slow but what little has been produced lets me see a way forward. I’ve become much more tonal but am using the structural and procedural techniques that I used in Figures to organize that tonality. And I have better headphones good god the sound was awful for several years.

An empty Manhattan, some scribbled sheet music, and a somewhat constrictive work space. Why am I not getting more work done?!?

The Ballad of Barbarella the Smuggler

While hunting for different editions of the Barbarella comic, I came across a rarity from Virgin Record Stores in the UK from 1981. Around that time, the second collection of Barbarella comics, Le Coleres du Manges-Minutes, was released in various editions internationally and Virgin Records printed a four-issue series in English under the title The New Adventures of Barbarella (this title was also used in the German Heyne editions a decade earlier with Die Neuen Abenteuer der Barbarella). Those Virgin Records publications had become my white whale in both their rarity and cost. Rarity being the biggest barrier because for a while I could only find visual records of their existence and none for sale. Eventually, I pieced together numbers 2, 3, and 4 for a decent and not embarrassing price. The cost of my collection as a whole is embarrassing, but only for a few editions am I actually uncomfortable confessing how much I paid.

But still the Virgin Records issue number 1 was elusive.